Standing in the lower lobby of the Hilton Chicago waiting for the doors to open on the 13th annual Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition, Asher Brauner advises Homajeet Singh on how to approach the biggest bargain book sale in the world. “It’s sharp elbows time,” he says. “If you get there before someone else, you may get the book. If you wait, you won’t.”
In the distance a bell rings. Brauner turns his cap backward. “That’s my racing look,” he says. The doors open, and he and Singh join the throng of over 1,400 buyers streaming into the hall.
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If Brad Jonas hadn’t came up with the idea for CIROBE 13 years ago, it’s not clear that anyone else would have. Then as now, Jonas was co-owner of the three Powell’s Bookstores in Chicago plus a wholesale book business. Most people would have considered that enough to fill their time, but Jonas had a notion that the remainder market needed to be better organized. “I had always bought remainder books,” he says, “and I had been percolating an idea that the bargain part of the book business needed its own home. And I would say this to different people, and most people sloughed it off as just me yammering.” He attributes a lot of the resistance he encountered to simple snobbery–many people in the book business look down their noses at the bargain sector.
Smith moved from new books to bargain books in the 80s, attracted by the higher profit margin and merchandise that actually existed at the time of sale. The downside of the bargain market is that it’s slower. “It’s just the nature of used-book sellers,” Smith says: “Got a nice book–if it’s worth this, that’s what it’s worth, and I’m gonna leave it sit here at that price until somebody buys it.”
The remainder market in its current robust form is a by-product of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling, Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The case concerned an accounting loophole through which companies deducted the depreciation of warehoused inventories from their taxable revenues. The problem from the IRS’s point of view was that no one was actually abiding by the reduced values they declared. In fact, businesses frequently sold off “depreciated” stock at prices equal to or greater than its original retail value. Publishers liked this trick as much as any other business. “I remember you’d see an old price on a remainder,” Jonas says. “It would say $10, but somebody would put a sticker on it that would say $12 or $14.”
One of the things that sets CIROBE apart from more mainstream publishing events, continues Small, is that it’s all business. “Generally book shows are not writing shows any longer,” he says, meaning that they’re not places where buyers actually place orders. “There’s author appearances, there’s hype, you’ll get producers of TV shows trying to book authors, that kind of thing. This show has been from day one a pure writing show. Everyone who comes is here to write business.”
